The present invention relates generally to search engine optimization, and more particularly to tools and methods for improving a website for search engine visibility.
The Internet is being increasingly used to relay information, advertise, and engage in e-commerce. With the increase in web site building and publication tools, many users who might not otherwise have the time or skill to create their own websites or the money to hire an outside consultant are now publishing to the World Wide Web. For example, such tools often provide web page templates that allow a user to enter personalized content and select web page layout, styles, fonts, colors, etc., and then immediately publish the completed pages to the Internet.
A search engine is typically used by Internet users to find web pages relevant to user input search terms. In a typical search engine, a user is presented with a web page which prompts the user for one or more search terms. Upon entry of the search term(s), the search engine scans its index of the World Wide Web to locate web pages that may have some relevancy to the input search terms. FIG. 1 shows an example search engine results page. As shown, a search engine results page typically includes a section containing paid search results and a section including organic search results. Paid search results are advertisements paid for by the advertiser and therefore may or may not be closely relevant to the search terms. Organic search results are results that are relevant in some manner to the input search terms. Search engines typically rank the organic search results by relevance of the content of the page to the search term such that those pages which have the closest relevance to the input search terms appear higher up in the search results than those less relevant.
At the present number of websites accessible over the Internet (current estimates as of early 2010 are in the hundreds of millions of websites), and as the number of web sites and web pages increases, the importance of being visible in the organic search results within the first few search results pages cannot be underestimated.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website so that it appears high up in search engine results pages. Search engines crawl the Internet, ranking websites according to content of the websites. Many websites include metadata that does not get displayed as content of the website, but is included in the HTML (or other browser-enabled) source code and describes content of the website and keywords to enable search engines to identify the website as relevant to certain search terms. In order to get found online, it is important for website designers to insert relevant and frequently searched-for search terms in the metadata of the pages of the website.
SEO is a task that the website administrator normally has to do manually. The website administrator can be an individual who owns or maintains the website, or may be an outside consultant whose business it is to design, create and maintain websites. Because search engine optimization involves complex analytics and an understanding and ability to correspond search terms to a web page, SEO has heretofore typically been managed by professional web site developers or other individuals who have developed the skill set needed to manage the website SEO.
Many small businesses and other individuals do not have the time, knowledge, or money to optimize their websites for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These customers need to be able to rank better in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in order to be competitive and drive more business to their websites by getting found online.
Existing solutions to this problem are too expensive, too complicated, and require SEO knowledge that many website owners do not have. All known solutions involve a “Do It For You” approach. In one approach, a consultant analyzes and optimizes the website for the website owner. In another approach, tools are provided to the website owner/administrator, to perform a simple analysis of a website. However, these tools do not automatically fix the items identified by the analysis, or guide the user through ways to change the website to improve search engine visibility, or provide realtime visibility into how updates to the website affect the visibility of the site to search engines.